Tuesday, December 21, 2021
Union is disappointed
Justice Minister wants to overturn data retention
The precautionary storage of telephone and Internet data is highly controversial from a legal point of view. Investigators want the instrument, for example in the fight against child pornography. Now Justice Minister Buschmann is making short work and announcing that data retention will be removed from the law.
Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann wants to overturn the controversial data retention in Germany. “I reject the unauthorized data retention and would like to delete it from the law for good,” said Buschmann to the newspapers of the Funke media group. The data retention violates fundamental rights, said Buschmann. “If everyone has to reckon with the fact that a lot of their communication is saved for no reason, then nobody feels free anymore.” For this reason, the courts have “repeatedly stopped” the application of unreasonable data retention.
In the course of data retention, the providers of telecommunications services are to save the location data of all citizens for four weeks, their communication and other connection data for up to ten weeks as a precaution. However, because numerous lawsuits are pending before the Federal Constitutional Court, the application of the regulation is currently suspended.
Buschmann advocated that telecommunications providers should instead “have to quickly secure data on a specific occasion by a court order so that the police and the public prosecutor can then evaluate it”. This should also “only be possible if serious criminal offenses are suspected”. Such a procedure would be “under the rule of law and would give the investigators an instrument for uncovering criminal offenses again,” said Buschmann. “That would be a gain for freedom and security at the same time.”
Criticism from the Union
The Union criticized Buschmann’s move as a “step in the completely wrong direction”. The deputy Union parliamentary group leader Andrea Lindholz from the CSU pointed out that investigators considered the instrument of data retention to be urgently needed. “In 2017 alone, 8,400 reports of sexual offenses against children could not be pursued by the German authorities because the connection data had already been deleted,” she said. “The traffic light would do well to take a clear stance against child pornography instead of weakening the protection of the weakest in our society for data protection reasons.”
The German Association of Journalists (DJV), however, welcomed the announcement by the minister. The DJV federal chairman Frank Überall called Buschmann’s proposal a “feasible way” to reconcile the security interests of the state with the rights of freedom. “Even if data retention is currently overridden, it must finally be removed from state laws,” he said. Otherwise she would continue to hang “like a sword of Damocles” over journalists and their informants.
The decision of the ECJ is still pending
Buschmann announced that, together with the Social Democratic Federal Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, the security laws as a whole would be put to the test. “As one of the first projects I would like to initiate a surveillance accounting with Nancy Faeser, and we want to scientifically evaluate the security laws independently in this election period,” he announced. The aim is to “strengthen civil rights”.
The storage of telephone and Internet connection data in advance is highly controversial. In October 2020, the European Court of Justice ruled that security authorities in the EU are only allowed to save such data in special exceptional cases – for example in the event of an acute threat to national security or to combat serious crime. Comprehensive and blanket storage of Internet and telephone connection data is therefore not permitted. The judgments concerned regulations in Great Britain, France and Belgium. The German Federal Administrative Court had also turned to the ECJ, the decision is still pending.